Sponsored blog posts are a genuinely great way to earn from your own content, and they can be a strong motivator, especially for new bloggers who find it discouraging to keep publishing quality content week after week with little to no return in the early stages.
In this post, I’ll walk through what sponsored blog posts actually are, how to land these opportunities for your own blog, and where to look for companies that sponsor bloggers.
How Blogging Makes Money With Sponsored Blog Posts
A sponsored blog post is simply a post that a company pays you to publish on your blog. You create the content based on terms agreed upon with that company, ideally structured so it’s genuinely a win-win for both sides.
Sponsored posts generally fall into a few categories:
1. Product Reviews
This involves writing a detailed, informative review of a specific product. It works best when you’ve genuinely used the product yourself and understand it well, its strengths, its downsides, and how someone would actually use it.
This makes the writing process far easier, since you’re not scrambling for random information about something you don’t know firsthand. It also protects your readers from being misled by a review based on guesswork.
2. Recommendations
This category overlaps with product reviews but leans more toward products or services you’ve personally used and genuinely believe your readers would benefit from trying.
The key distinction: you’re not trying to manipulate readers into a purchase. You want genuine confidence that whatever you’re recommending actually delivers as promised, and that the sponsorship itself doesn’t distort the honesty of your recommendation.
3. Company Reviews
Unlike product reviews or recommendations, this involves covering an entire company, often with several links pointing to dedicated landing pages.
Here, you’re covering what the company does, its products or services, how it operates, its customer service, and any relevant regulatory information.
The goal is making sure your readers get everything they’d want to know about the company, with links available within the post for anything that needs more depth.
Important Tips for Sponsored Blog Posts
- Disclose sponsorships clearly. In the US, you’re required to follow FTC (Federal Trade Commission) guidelines, which means clearly disclosing that a post is sponsored and identifying who the sponsor is. This applies regardless of the platform, blog post, social media, or otherwise.
- Be genuinely selective with sponsors. Only work with brands that authentically relate to and appeal to your readers. Publishing irrelevant sponsored content purely for the payout comes across as spammy and erodes trust. Your readers are effectively your customers, and their trust matters more than any single sponsorship deal.
Stick to these principles, and sponsored blog posts can become a genuinely sustainable, trustworthy income stream for your blog.
How Do You Actually Get Blog Post Sponsorships?
Sponsored posts sound straightforward in theory, the real challenge is finding sponsors in the first place. Here’s a practical approach that tends to work:
1. Create a Sponsored Post Page
This lets potential sponsors know upfront that you accept sponsorships. You never know who’s browsing your blog, so having a clear, appealing page dedicated to this can catch the attention of a sponsor who stumbles across your site organically.
2. Put Together a Media Kit
A media kit functions like a professional resume for your blog and can genuinely help seal a deal with an interested sponsor. Make it polished and easy to skim. Include:
- Your name
- Contact information
- Your website’s URL and name
- Social media stats (platforms used and follower counts)
- Monthly pageviews, pulled from Google Analytics
- A clear summary of what you can offer sponsors
- Some information about your audience, demographics, interests, engagement patterns
If you have an email list, include its size here too, email audiences are often genuinely valued by sponsors since they represent a more direct, engaged channel.
3. Publish Consistently Good Content
Content remains genuinely central here. Strong, valuable content naturally retains readers, and sponsorships work best when you’ve already built a loyal, engaged audience.
Make sure your content genuinely delivers value to readers, since this is also what convinces sponsors you’re worth investing in. Everyone wants to work with someone who’s reliably capable of delivering quality results.
4. Reach Out to Brands That Fit Your Blog
Rather than waiting to be discovered, proactively identify brands that align with your niche and pitch them directly. Most brands have contact pages or dedicated partnership inquiry forms where you can submit proposals and ideas.
5. Check Who’s Sponsoring Your Competitors
Look into which sponsors are currently working with other blogs in your niche. This is a strong strategy, since it confirms those sponsors are already actively interested in working with blogs similar to yours.
6. Use Your Display Ads as a Lead Source
If you’re already running Google AdSense or another display ad network, take note of which brands’ ads consistently appear on your blog, since this suggests genuine relevance to your niche.
Identify the companies behind those ads and reach out to them directly and professionally. Having a polished media kit ready makes this process much smoother, since it gives the brand everything they need to evaluate you quickly.
7. Maintain the Relationship Once You’re Sponsored
Repeat partnerships with the same sponsors build genuine trust over time, making them far more likely to work with you again in the future. A few things that help here:
- Consistently deliver your best work on every sponsored post
- Keep a positive, collaborative attitude toward each project
- Stay courteous and professional throughout
- Communicate openly and promptly
Sponsored Blog Post Networks Worth Knowing About
The influencer and sponsored content platform landscape has shifted meaningfully since this topic was first covered, so it’s worth an update here:
- IZEA remains an active, established platform connecting bloggers and creators with brands looking to sponsor content.
- AspireIQ rebranded simply to Aspire a few years back. It’s worth knowing that Aspire has shifted toward a heavily enterprise-focused model, with custom pricing generally starting in the thousands of dollars per month for brands. This makes it primarily a platform brands use to find creators rather than something an individual blogger applies to directly, so it’s less of a fit for a new or smaller blog reaching out independently.
Given how quickly platforms in this space get acquired, rebrand, or shut down, it’s genuinely worth searching for “influencer marketing platforms for bloggers” periodically and checking current reviews before committing time to any specific one, rather than relying on a fixed list that can go stale within a year or two.
A Few Extra Things to Keep in Mind
- Set a rate card, even a rough one. Having a baseline idea of what you’d charge for different types of sponsored content (a single post, a post plus social promotion, a multi-post series) makes negotiations faster and more confident.
- Don’t undersell yourself early on. It’s tempting to accept very low offers just to get started, but consistently underpricing can make it harder to raise your rates later with the same sponsors.
- Keep records of past sponsorships. A simple log of who you’ve worked with, what the deliverables were, and how it performed becomes genuinely useful both for your media kit and for pitching future sponsors.
Conclusion
Sponsored blog posts can become a genuinely reliable income stream once you’ve built a decent audience and a track record of quality content. Focus on staying selective about who you work with, keep your disclosures transparent, and put real effort into your media kit and outreach.
I hope you found this useful and picked up something valuable on how blogging makes money through sponsored posts. Let me know what you think in the comments, any suggestions or questions are welcome, I’ll be happy to hear from you.
